l arena will add video boar

l arena will add video boar

H. Wayne Huizenga Authentic Jaire Alexander Jersey , a college dropout who built a business empire that included Blockbuster Entertainment, AutoNation and three professional sports franchises, has died. He was 80.

Huizenga (HY'-zing-ah) died Thursday night at his home, said Valerie Hinkell, a longtime assistant. The cause was cancer, said Bob Henninger, executive vice president of Huizenga Holdings.

Starting with a single garbage truck in 1968, Huizenga built Waste Management Inc. into a Fortune 500 company. He purchased independent sanitation engineering companies, and by the time he took the company public in 1972, he had completed the acquisition of 133 small-time haulers. By 1983, Waste Management was the largest waste disposal company in the United States.

The business model worked again with Blockbuster Video, which he started in 1985 and built into the leading movie rental chain nine years later. In 1996, he formed AutoNation and built it into a Fortune 500 company.

Huizenga was founding owner of baseball's Florida Marlins and the NHL's Florida Panthers 鈥?expansion teams that played their first games in 1993. He bought the NFL's Miami Dolphins and their stadium for $168 million in 1994 from the children of founder Joe Robbie but had sold all three teams by 2009.

"Wayne Huizenga was a seminal figure in the cultural history of South Florida," current Dolphins owner Stephen Ross said in a statement. "He completely changed the landscape of the region's sports scene. ... Sports fans throughout the region owe him a debt of thanks."

The Marlins won the 1997 World Series, and the Panthers reached the Stanley Cup Finals in 1996, but Huizenga's beloved Dolphins never reached a Super Bowl while he owned the team.

"If I have one disappointment, the disappointment would be that we did not bring a championship home," Huizenga said shortly after he sold the Dolphins to Ross. "It's something we failed to do."

Huizenga earned an almost cult-like following among business investors who watched him build Blockbuster Entertainment into the leading video rental chain by snapping up competitors. He cracked Forbes' list of the 100 richest Americans Connor Williams Color Rush Jersey , becoming chairman of Republic Services, one of the nation's top waste management companies, and AutoNation, the nation's largest automotive retailer. In 2013, Forbes estimated his wealth at $2.5 billion.

For a time, Huizenga was also a favorite with South Florida sports fans, drawing cheers and autograph seekers in public. The crowd roared when he danced the hokeypokey on the field during an early Marlins game. He went on a spending spree to build a veteran team that won the World Series in the franchise's fifth year.

But his popularity plummeted when he ordered the roster dismantled after that season. He was frustrated by poor attendance and his failure to swing a deal for a new ballpark built with taxpayer money.

Many South Florida fans never forgave him for breaking up the championship team. Huizenga drew boos when introduced at Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino's retirement celebration in 2000 and kept a lower public profile after that.

In 2009, Huizenga said he regretted ordering the Marlins' payroll purge.

"We lost $34 million the year we won the World Series, and I just said, 'You know what, I'm not going to do that,'" Huizenga said. "If I had it to do over again, I'd say, 'OK, we'll go one more year.'"

He sold the Marlins in 1999 to John Henry, and sold the Panthers in 2001, unhappy with rising NHL player salaries and the stock price for the team's public company.

Tributes from three sports and beyond poured in, reflecting the range of his reach.

The Marlins released a statement describing Huizenga as "the original Florida Marlin," and said he "will be remembered as much for his contributions to South Florida professional sports as he was for his many charitable endeavors in the surrounding community."

Huizenga's first sports love was the Dolphins 鈥?he had been a season-ticket holder since their first season in 1966. But he fared better in the NFL as a businessman than as a sports fan.

He turned a nifty profit by selling the Dolphins and their stadium for $1.1 billion, nearly seven times what he paid to become sole owner. But he knew the bottom line in the NFL is championships, and his Dolphins perennially came up short.

Huizenga earned a reputation as a hands-off owner and won raves from many loyal employees, even though he made six coaching changes. He eased Pro Football Hall of Famer Don Shula into retirement in early 1996, and Jimmy Johnson, Dave Wannstedt, interim coach Jim Bates, Nick Saban, Cam Cameron and Tony Sparano followed as coach.

Johnson tweeted: "A great man, one of the nicest individuals I have ever known, Wayne Huizenga passed away. RIP."

Harry Wayne Huizenga was born in the Chicago suburbs on Dec. 29, 1937, to a family of garbage haulers. He began his business career in Pompano Beach in 1962, driving a garbage truck from 2 a.m. to noon each day for $500 a month.

One customer successfully sued Huizenga, saying that in an argument over a delinquent account, Huizenga injured him by grabbing his testicles 鈥?an allegation Huizenga always denied.

"I never did that. The guy was a deputy cop. It was his word against mine, a young kid Youth M.J. Stewart Jersey ," he told Fortune magazine in 1996.

Huizenga was a five-time recipient of Financial World magazine's "CEO of the Year" award, and was the Ernst & Young "2005 World Entrepreneur of the Year."

Regarding his business acumen, Huizenga said: "You just have to be in the right place at the right time. It can only happen in America."

In 1960, he married Joyce VanderWagon. Together they had two chil

Western Kentucky athletic director Todd Stewart is proud of the school's ongoing success in competition and classwork.

The Hilltoppers earned Conference USA titles in women's basketball and volleyball this past year, bringing the total to 24 since entering the league in 2014. Stewart noted that his school has twice the hardware of the next closest conference member, Middle Tennessee, over the same time period.

WKU also posted a graduation rate of 85 percent with 11 of 14 programs registering at least 970 in the NCAA's Academic Progress Rate. Four posted perfect 1,000 scores, making Stewart proud on multiple levels as he enters his seventh year as AD.

"Big-picture wise, I feel really good about where we are because the winning continued," Stewart told the Associated Press. "We've doubled everybody up and at the same time our graduation success rate is 85 percent, the highest it's been in WKU athletics.

"That speaks to our coaches and athletes and doing it the right way, and doing it well."

Volleyball showed that by winning its fourth consecutive regular season and tournament titles and reaching the second round of the NCAA Tournament. Alyssa Cavanaugh was recently named C-USA Female Athlete of the Year, the third Hilltopper to earn the prestigious honor over the past four years.

Women's basketball meanwhile won its second consecutive tournament title and third in four years under former coach Michelle Clark-Heard. The former Hilltopper player left soon after the NCAA Tournament for the head coaching job at Cincinnati, where she had been an assistant.

Stewart wasn't shocked Clark-Heard earned another opportunity after she went 154-48 over six seasons with four NCAA appearances in Bowling Green. The AD promoted associate coach Greg Collins to the lead job, believing his familiarity with the program can maintain the winning.

"She just did a phenomenal job," Stewart said of Clark-Heard. "We knew we had a succession plan in place, so when she decided to go to Cincinnati it was easy to name Greg the head coach Youth Troy Apke Jersey , and our players are excited about that."

Men's basketball has generated similar anticipation after reaching the NIT semifinal under second-year coach Rick Stansbury. Early-season upsets of No. 18 Purdue and SMU spurred WKU (27-11) to achieve its highest win total in a decade before falling to Utah in New York City.

Stansbury's next step is earning the 'Toppers' first NCAA appearance since 2013 with a C-USA title and automatic bid. Encouraged by an incoming class featuring 6-foot-11 Charles Bassey and a returning cast led by guard Taveion Hollingsworth 鈥?a former AP Kentucky Player of the Year 鈥?the coach believes his team is capable of bigger things.

"I don't want it to be 'maybe'. We can," Stansbury said of his team's outlook. "Last year was a brand new team, a fun team to watch. We had some great success early. This is a fun team because we have good people and that's why it mixed so well."

After back-to-back C-USA titles and bowl wins under Jeff Brohm, the football team finished 6-7 in Mike Sanford's head coaching debut and played in its fourth consecutive bowl. Linebacker Joel Iyiegbuniwe (fourth round, Chicago Bears) and quarterback Mike White (fifth round, Dallas Cowboys) were selected in the NFL Draft, giving the program seven selections since 2016.

The Hilltoppers' challenge now is replacing those two key players with a schedule that includes in-state rival Louisville and Big Ten member Wisconsin along with a tough C-USA docket.

"The problems that come with winning are better than those that come with losing," said Stewart, who has seen Bobby Petrino (Louisville) and Brohm (Purdue) parlay successful WKU tenures into Power 5 coaching jobs. He believes WKU can compete this year now that Sanford has put talent and personnel in place.

"People became used to precedent and it's hard to win three (titles) in a row," he added. "Last year was kind of a reset, mainly because the 2017 roster was so different from 2016."

Stewart's positive outlook for his program is being reflected in facility upgrades to meet increased ticket demand, especially in basketball. The football stadium and basketball arena will add video boards and improve sound systems, and the AD is eager to see how C-USA's new TV deal with CBS Sports Network benefits exposure.

The AD acknowledges that WKU remains challenged financially, but takes satisfaction in how his program has thrived despite lagging behind other conference schools. Stewart believes that success will pay off and remains committed to making it happen.

"Hopefully the situation gets better for us, because if it does I think we can do bigger and better things," he said. "What we sell here is that we have a winning culture. There are a lot of positives, and that's what we try to focus on."